Earth's Layers
These are Earth's three compositional layers.
What are the crust, mantle, and core?
This layer is about the size of the moon.
What is the inner core?
This law states that each undisturbed layer of sedimentary rock is older than the layers above it.
What is the Law of Superposition?
This abbreviation stands for million years ago.
What is mya?
This is a fracture in the Earth where movement has occurred.
What is a fault?
These are Earth's five mechanical years.
What are the lithosphere, asthenosphere, mesosphere, outer core, and inner core?
These types of layers are classified based on how they act or behave.
What are mechanical layers?
This type of fossil only lived for a short period of time before going extinct and can be used to identify geologic periods and correlate layers.
What is an index fossil?
This method can date once living things that are up to 60,000 years old.
What is carbon-14 (radiocarbon) dating?
This type of dating can determine the specific age of a fossil.
What is absolute dating?
These are the two types of tectonic/crustal plates.
What are oceanic and continental?
These are responsible for the slow flowing movement of the mantle.
What are convection currents?
This is the name for any disturbance in a rock layer.
What is an unconformity?
These are two specific types of dating that can date organic and inorganic substances, respectively.
What are Carbon-14 (radiocarbon) dating and Potassium-Argon dating?
When molten rock forces its way up through the rock layers but does not reach Earth's surface.
What is an igneous intrusion?
This mechanical layer is partially molten and allows tectonic plates to slowly move on top of it.
What is the asthenosphere?
This layer has a name that means "middle" and can also be found in the layers of the atmosphere.
What is the mesosphere?
This law states that if an igneous intrusion or a fault cuts through existing rocks, the intrusion/fault is younger than the rock it cuts through.
What is the Law of Cross-Cutting Relationships?
This method would work well for dating ancient rocks.
What is potassium argon dating?
This process uses radioactive decay and half-lives to determine the age of rocks and fossils.
What is absolute dating?
This compositional layer can be thick or thin depending on where it is located geographically.
What is the crust?
This compositional layer of Earth is not completely solid or completely liquid, but somewhere in between.
What is the mantle?
This law states that sedimentary rock layers are deposited horizontally because of gravity. If they are tilted, folded, or broken; it happened later.
What is the Law of Original Horizontality?
When magma/lava cools, these types of elements are incorporated into the rocks/minerals.
What are radioactive elements?
When rock layers in different places are matched up by looking at fossils.
What is correlation?